This was my first motorcycle trip where I succeeded in finding
a campground and pitching a tent every evening without booking any
hotels. I was able to reserve tent sites a day ahead using my
cell phone. There is a lot involved with tenting. You have to
get into camp. You have to unpack, clean up, and buy tokens and
laundry detergent before the office closes. Only then can you get
supper. This cuts a couple of hours off the time available for
riding and sight-seeing every day. By comparison hotel desks are
open
later. Here is a map showing the routes of my trip and the
campgrounds where I stayed.

Many of the photos on this Web site are from my trip.

I see I managed to cover some distance and visited some places
that don't show in any of my photographs such as Boise City in the
panhandle of OK, the heart of
the Dustbowl of the 1930s. I recall a succession of
grain elevators (They
use irrigation nowadays.) never out of sight for 160
miles along the railroad between Dodge City, KS, and Boise City, OK, that
rise gradually out of the oncoming plain, tower over the terrain
for an instant, and recede again into the monotony of my rear-view
mirror. Then there was a 75 mile stretch between
Trinidad and La Junta, CO, in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains without any
roadside services. That was a true desert as far as I could tell.
Yet the landscape was eerily peaceful and thus memorable.

Where is Santa Fe?
Where's Boonslick for that matter? How do you get from one
to the other? The first thing to do is look at rivers because the
smoothest terrain is along their banks, so, if you're driving a
wagon train cross-country, you pick a river that flows to or from
the direction you want to go and follow it. Not only will you
have fewer geological obstacles, but you'll also have water and
forage for your livestock.

Consider
the map of the Santa Fe Trail (U.S. National Park
Service, Map, National Historic Trails). See how the
important rivers tend to flow from the northwest to the southeast
while the trail tends to cross them. The trail itself has many
different cutoffs. Most of these were created by travelers
choosing different places to ford the Arkansas River. Their choices depended on
the weather and current: whether the trail was muddier or dustier
on one side or the other, whether grass appeared greener ahead or
on the other side, whether potable water was scarce on the other
side or not. If you zoom in on western Kansas, you can count the
number of principal crossings from Fort Larned to as far west as Bent's Old Fort in what is now Colorado.

The northern route follows the Arkansas River from the area of
present-day Great Bend, KS, to Bent's Old Fort near present-day La Junta, CO. Then
it turns south to Raton
Pass. This was the big obstacle against use of the northern
route, and a toll road through the mountain pass was improved
following the Civil War by Richard L. "Uncle Dick" Wooton.

The southern route follows the dry bed of
the Cimarron River,
which flows only intermittently in these reaches. Not for nothing
is the river called unruly. The trail cuts through the
Cimarron
Strip, the panhandle of present-day Oklahoma. The big obstacles
against use of this route were lack of water and Indian attacks;
nevertheless, it was more commonly used because it was
shorter.

As the railroad pushed into Kansas and Colorado, it cut off
traffic along the Dry Route because the trip from the end of track
to Santa Fe and to the huge federal army supply depot at Fort
Union was shorter over what was left of the Mountain Route. Thus,
large freight contractors of previous decades were deprived of
mileage-based revenue, and traffic resorted to local New Mexico
subcontractors (Sperry).